Tuesday Morning Links

This and that for your Tuesday reading.

- Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac offer a stark look at the plausible worst-case scenario for a climate breakdown over just the next thirty years. And Zarah Sultana argues that in the UK (as elsewhere), we need to demand transformative politics to respond to our social and environmental crises:

The scale of the climate crisis means moderation won’t cut it. The only answers are radical. Socialists across borders will need to link up to campaign for an international Green New Deal. It will tax the super-rich and take on polluting profiteers who wreak havoc from Brazil to Bangladesh. It will create new, green industries that will save our communities while saving our planet too. None of it will be possible without confronting the existing order, where 100 companies are responsible for 70 per cent of global pollution. Our lives are threatened by their pursuit of profit. 
 
Call it ‘taking back control’ if you like — taking control away from the billionaires and winning it for workers in every corner of the planet. This means being clear that our allies are the dispossessed everywhere, and our enemies arrive by limousine not dinghy, with green politics as a new class politics for our age.

My generation grew up being told there was no alternative to cuts and declining opportunities. That was miserable enough. Now that dismal economic model is putting our planet in peril.

We can be the generation that rises to this existential challenge. We can end the cycle of capitalist destruction. As our planet burns, we must make good on the promise of an old socialist hymn: We will bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old.

- Andrew Nikiforuk suggests that federal approval of the Teck Frontier mine could provide Alberta with a lesson in when to stop digging - though the danger is that even allowing Jason Kenney to oversee development could further destabilize the ground for everybody.

- Andrew MacLeod highlights how the RCMP has been interfering with free reporting in the course of its Wet’suwet’en raids - presumably with reference to its documented concern about allowing activists to with public support.

- Finally, Amir Barnea makes the case for Canada Post to offer affordable banking and financial services to people left behind by the financial sector.